Bid to win back workers
Auckland is not alone: Like many US cities, Seattle struggles with crime and homelessness during pandemic
At a crime-ridden intersection in downtown Seattle, Amazon workers are moving out and the cops are moving in.
In a several-block area of the city’s commercial district steps from the Pike Place Market, where tourists visit the original Starbucks and watch vendors sling salmon, a spate of shootings and stabbings has led police to deploy a mobile precinct amid an outcry from residents and businesses. The area has always blended tech startups with a seedier element, but as the city and businesses try to get foot traffic to return, downtown offices are bulking up on private security and stores are fashioning homemade door barriers to protect against street crime.
At least one occupant voted with its feet after violent crime last year reached a 13-year high: Amazon temporarily shuttered an office in the area, telling 1800 employees to work from other locations. Amazon has its own private security and the area has seen an influx of police officers in the past several weeks, yet workers and managers expressed concerns about safety. Other startups aren’t sure they’ll stay.
It’s the first big test for Seattle’s new mayor, Bruce Harrell, who has taken steps to address the issues but faces an impatient voter base. Swept into office on a law-and-order platform that also pledged to stem rising homelessness, crime has instead worsened downtown and the area’s post-Covid rebound is lagging behind other parts of the city. Similar factors led New York City to elect Eric Adams and his tough-on-crime platform. Whether Harrell and other mayors facing such challenges succeed could dictate whether urban centres that had been flourishing before the pandemic can regain their lustre for employers, residents and tourists.
Suburban competition
Seattle faces competition from nearby suburbs like Bellevue that have lower crime rates. Companies can move there and still recruit from the same engineering talent pool that makes Seattle an attractive home base. Amazon and Meta, which have large presences in Seattle neighbourhoods near downtown, are expanding in Bellevue. It’s a quandary facing other mayors — Citadel founder Ken Griffin said his firm’s future in Chicago may be counted in years, not decades, if officials don’t get a handle on crime, while San Francisco is struggling with safety concerns and one of the lowest return-to-office rates of major cities.
Seattle cops and politicians have referred to the crime-prone area as an “open-air drug market” for years, and there have been campaigns to arrest dealers and clean up the streets. But the issue has been particularly acute recently. Since February 21, there have been at least three shootings, two stabbings and one carjacking, according to the Seattle Police Department’s Twitter account.
Citywide, the rate of violent crime last year was the highest it had been in data going back to 2008. Nationwide, the overall violent crime rate was up 5.6 per cent and property crimes up 8 per cent in 2020. Statistics for 2021 have not yet been released.
Greater Seattle is the biggest US tech hub outside the Bay Area, with two of the five biggest tech companies by market cap, Amazon and Microsoft. While Microsoft has always been in the suburbs, the population of engineers and millionaires it created helped build a vital startup scene. Amazon pioneered the idea of an attractive urban campus with a vibrant bar and restaurant scene. The talent pool attracted companies like Google, Meta and Apple, and local venture capitalists shored up fields like cloud computing and AI.
Amazon said it’s hopeful it will be able to bring back workers when it’s safer. Two Amazon executives served on Harrell's transition team, and Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy has said he is open to a fresh dialogue with the city. Yet its abrupt departure from the heart of downtown underscores it will take more than handshakes and toned-down rhetoric to bring business back to downtown — especially to a corridor that still looks like the backdrop to an apocalyptic movie, with shuttered storefront and deserted streets.
Rising Crime
The rate of violent crime in Seattle soared last year after a drop in 2020.
“This is ongoing work,” Harrell said at a press conference last month, announcing new steps around policing and enforcement. “The first step has to be stabilising the area, shutting down criminal behaviour and resetting norms.”
Harrell, elected in a city with a council that has repeatedly considered cutting the police budget, says he wants more, better trained cops. It’s an approach other mayors are adopting. San Francisco’s London Breed and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, who both face re-election in 2023, have expressed a desire to get more boots on the ground.
Since taking office in January, Harrell has focused on clearing homeless encampments from streets and parks — including one across from City Hall — and getting their residents in shelters. He’s created a new system to keep track of concerns about encampments, but it’s too early to tell if he’s making progress in overall numbers of unhoused people.
“There are no quick fixes to the challenge of homelessness,” Harrell's office said. “The mayor has put a renewed urgency and focus on improving the city’s response by streamlining department coordination and constituent engagement, working to improve data collection and city resource deployment towards helping those living unsheltered access shelter and services, and keeping sidewalks, parks and public areas clear.”
Harrell’s professed style pairs law enforcement and criminal prosecution with work to get addicts into treatment and social services teams to address the needs of the unhoused. In the troubled Pike/Pine blocks, he’s deployed six permanent officers and additional patrols. Since Third Avenue is a key corridor for bus and light rail, stops and stations are being cleaned, and one problematic stop has been temporarily shut.
There are limits to what Seattle can control since it’s part of a larger county. The city attorney’s office only prosecutes misdemeanors, light rail is regional and the homelessness strategy recently shifted to a regional one as well. An effective playbook will require Harrell to forge partnerships.
“We all want to see a lot more happening a lot faster,” said Heather
Redman, a Seattle venture capitalist who lives and works in the troubled area. Prior to the recent city actions, Redman said there were sometimes 100 people loitering nightly on Third Avenue between Pike and Pine.
“It’s like a whole kind of village of drug-related activities,” she said. “There’s just no reason to have that going on in the very heart of downtown where every tourist, business and all the transit has to go through.”
Maria Karaivanova, co-founder of WhyLabs, wants to keep her AI software company in the downtown area. It’s a great central location for her employees, and her Third Avenue building has nice amenities and stunning views of Elliot Bay. She and her workers try to support local restaurants, but when they go out for lunch, they travel in groups.
“We are making the best of it and hoping with the new mayor things will get better,” she said.
During a recent lunch hour, an Allied Universal security guard stood at the corner of Third and Union outside a gelato shop. Nearly every store was boarded up, although a few, like a Subway sandwich shop, were open behind the plywood. Three police officers kept a watchful eye at a corner, as Downtown Seattle Association cleaners picked up rubbish, some of which had collected in front of Benaroya Hall, home to the Seattle Symphony.
The DSA, a coalition of almost 700 businesses and nonprofits, said it steeply increased spending on offduty cops and private security guards to more than US$500,000 between July and January. Previously, the group had private security watching over two parks, but is now deploying guards on sidewalks and inpublic areas along Third Avenue, said Jon Scholes, the group's president.
Who's Downtown?
The group is behind the new mayor. “He’s absolutely on the right track,” Scholes said.
Several hundred people packed into a hotel ballroom March 17 at DSA’s State of Downtown event, its first such in-person gathering since the start of the pandemic. The mostly maskless crowd listened to a recorded speech by Harrell, who pledged to address safety concerns. But attendees heard some sobering statistics. Office use downtown still stands at about 30 per cent of prepandemic levels, even as visitors to other places, like Pike Place Market, have rebounded.
During his campaign, Harrell suggested getting private entities to pay more for solutions to the homelessness crisis. In recent weeks Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft and the foundations of former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer pledged to donate $10 million to a new agency to co-ordinate responses to homelessness in Seattle and King County. Marc Dones, the agency’s CEO, says the group and the administration are working on quick-impact steps. One idea is a hotline someone can call when they see an unhoused person in crisis. “This town has suffered from too much visionary planning that is ‘in five years’,” Dones said. “I'm talking about a reality we can have in four weeks, five weeks.”
Bill Richter, CEO of Seattle tech company Qumulo, has been raising alarms for more than two years. That’s when gunfire erupted outside his company’s building, killing one person and injuring seven. He’s encouraged by Harrell’s steps, but says permanent change will take an ongoing police presence.
“I’m glad the mayor made the move, but boy did it take a lot of unfettered violence on the street to get them to respond.”